Stories from my Apartment Building, part III

Today, my husband rode the elevator with a 10-year-old neighbor from our apartment building. This boy comes from a family steeped in Torah values- the parents are constantly teaching and role-modeling all of the precepts of religious Judaism, in an authentic and sincere manner. 

This is the H. family who, when my husband and I were both recovering from being in the hospital in the same week (for stomach viruses leading to dehydration) brought down their mops and bucket and two upholstered chairs to our apartment, knocked on the door, and insisted that we sit on their two chairs which they placed in our kitchen while they scrubbed the floor of the bedroom and back room of our apartment, and then stripped the sheets off of our bed and replaced them with fresh bedding, and took our sheets away, promising to return them once they were clean (which their 14-year-old daughter did the following week, switching our newly laundered sheets for her family's now-used ones and disappearing without a word). They then came back to deliver warm, freshly made food for us to eat, and disappeared to let us crawl back into bed and continue recuperating, wondering what miracle had just descended into our apartment...

Back to the elevator- two women summoned the elevator, but upon seeing the doors open to reveal two men (my husband and the boy), they stepped back and declined the ride, choosing to wait for the next opportunity. The little boy saw this, and it didn't sit well with him- he felt that the women should be accommodated. He encouraged them to enter the elevator, assuring them that 'there would be enough space', and ending with the plea 'but elevators aren't considered yichud*!' as the doors closed. 

These women obviously had a very high personal standard of modesty, above the letter of the law. To which they were entitled. But what was touching to my husband was that this 10-year old boy has been trained to take care of people, to actively reach out and do acts of kindness in the world. He so badly wanted to spare them the inconvenience of waiting for another elevator, that he gave them multiple reasons to feel welcome to ride it. How many 10-year-old boys do you know that would do the same?


*yichud- the prohibition against Jewish men and women (who are not married or related) being alone together in a confined or secluded place. 

Everything I Have, I Need, and Everything I Need, I Have

      I recently read a story written by a woman I know, about her cancer diagnosis. She asked her Rabbi, "Now that I am diagnosed, how can I work on being happy?" (it's proven that state-of-mind has a HUGE effect on the progression or non-progression of cancer). 
     He answered her with a mantra:


Everything I need, I have, and everything I have, I need.


     Cancer was now counted amongst her 'needed' tools and possessions. 
     When I first read this, I was shocked- how would I be able to accept such a perspective, in her situation? But the more I think about it, the truer the statement sounds to me. 
G-d gives. To all of us. All the time. And if I look around, everything (absolutely everything) present in my existence is something G-d chose to give me. Everything that is not present in my life, by the same token, is something G-d chose to withhold.
     For the woman in this story, G-d was giving cancer- it must be something that she needed. He was withholding health- it must be something she did not need. She repeated this to herself every morning, for years.She writes:


" I decided that the fear and worry  were like smutty lyrics I would not stoop to listen to, and instead I put 'Everything I Need I Have, Everything I Have I Need' on the repeat function of my mind. Then even when lying in my hospital bed hooked up to an IV, in my heart I was dancing to the joyous music."


    And what's the end of the story? She doesn't seem sick now, and the diagnosis was 8 years ago. And even if it had turned out differently (G-d forbid), she would have experienced the illness with complete mental freedom and celebration. That's what I love about living with a Torah perspective. You become an internal warrior. 

How to Become Humble

I love my older brother, who called me yesterday to express his excitement over his newly-acquired treasury of poems. He knew I was one of the few people who could fully appreciate this.

In other news, I just knocked over a tupperware full of cut watermelon, WITH MY STOMACH. I remember in middle school being a size two and not at all satisfied with my appearance. And now I knock things over with my stomach. G-d really wanted to teach me humility, I suppose.

don't make chicken from the internet!!

I know that all I have been writing about is cooking but that's basically all I do lately. 
Cook, freeze, elevate my feet, repeat.
So without further ado...


Welcome to this week's episode of Making Chicken. 

Last week, I made the 2 flops (scroll down to 'I Don't Get It')- pineapple chicken and 'shwarma' style chicken. 


Every week I have 2 opportunities to make chicken, because we buy a whole chicken weekly, which I then defrost and prepare into one on-the-bone dish for the dark meat, and one chicken breast dish of some sort. The wings and neck sometimes end up in the dark meat dish as well. These are then divided into meals and frozen- I end up with 2 dark-meat dinners and 1 and a 1/2 white meat dinners. This is done in a whirlwind because once a chicken is defrosted, you have to move fast or it goes bad- so I make the 2 chicken dishes side-by-side to be frozen for later in the week. 


This week was the week I've decided (after the fact) never to use a recipe I find on the internet ever again.


I made 'Southwest Spice' chicken, found somewhere on the internet, with my white meat. I chose the recipe because it called, intriguingly, for unsweetened cocoa, along with chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. I measured out the spices and threw the strips of chicken breast together with them in a plastic bag, shook, and prepared the contents in a bit of oil on the frying pan. 

Um. My husband and I started coughing uncontrollably, not from smoke, but from the sheer SPICINESS of the Southwest Spice as it cooked! It actually made the air unbreathable! The chicken is too hot to be edible. I tasted it and the only thing I could think of (besides AAAAAH!) was that I guess I am supposed to be eating spicy to induce labor anyway...hope this works...

If anyone has any ideas for making this now-prepared chicken dish LESS spicy and therefore edible, let me know. 

My other internet recipe was for Chicken with Peas, adapted, said the website, from a chef in the Czech army. I had asked my husband to pick up a can of peas (he's taken over the grocery shopping, G-d bless him) in anticipation of making our weekly chicken into this dish. Halfway through the steps required in this dish, when it said 'pour can of peas into pan with sauteeing chicken', I looked for the can of peas and couldn't find it anywhere. So I asked him, and he said, the peas? You mean, the peaches?? And I finally understood why this giant can of Peach Halves in Syrup was in my cabinet. 


I happened to be on the phone with my father during this exchange with my husband. It was really funny to all 3 of us. Then I returned to the kitchen and asked my father what I should do with my sauteeing chicken. He asked if I had any other canned vegetables (no) and then suggested I use the peaches and make chicken-with-peaches! I did just that, blending them into a chunky sauce and pouring them onto the chicken. I haven't tried it yet, but based on my track record lately, it may flop like the last 3 chicken dishes. Sigh. 


If you have any fool-proof chicken recipes, please, please share. I won't consider them internet recipes- it's only a proper internet recipe when there's a photo, a star-rating, and comments (and when it flops, of course).

Tap Practice

For those of you who tap dance, 

I think my baby just did a f-lap
 in my stomach. 

For a moment I thought it was the 'pop' feeling
 that people experience

 in the moment their water breaks...

Wishful thinking.

It was just tap practice.